Hamburger inventor, film aficionado and golf all-star Kim Jong Il died last Saturday of heart complications from "overwork," said state media. The death of the Dear Leader -- said to have begun his life under the halo of a double rainbow that simultaneously brought about spring, according to North Korean official history -- left citizens …

Recently I've been fixated with totalitarian regimes, and it's beginning to show in my work. Today I published a piece titled "The odd reality behind Shanghai's Pyongyang restaurants" for CNNGo in which I discovered that waitresses of the three North Korean-government run Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai have no clue of each others' existence. Like the …

North Korea has always been an alluring topic to me. It's the mystery, I suppose; that lingering curiosity of wanting to peek into a land frozen in time, barred from the outside world, especially for Americans to say the least. Demick's book Nothing to Envy peels that mystery away and reveals what most already suspected …

Note: The following article appeared in The Groove on March 7, 2008, and is recreated here for archiving purposes. The 15th of August marks the day the Korean Peninsula was liberated from Japanese control at the end of World War II in 1945, a holiday celebrated by both North and South Korea. Unlike many other countries, Korean …

Criminals, social abstracts, and travelers: these are the types of people that generally make the decision to travel across the planet to teach English in Asia. It was my greatest hope upon arrival that I fit into the later of these categories. The recent clamp down on Korean immigration has come mostly in direct response from …